The use of rape as a weapon of war was
widespread in Kosovo. But the scale of the
atrocities has been hidden by Albanian
communities to hide their "shame" from the
outside world.

By Gordana Igric

In the thick atmosphere of an overheated room,
the woman explained the tragedy that had befallen
two families from the Decani region of Kosovo.
Last year it had been her job to lead her
family's half of the protracted negotiations that
traditionally precede the engagement and marriage
of a young Kosovo Albanian couple.

But in January the engagement was broken off. A
messenger brought news that the bride-to-be, a
beautiful 16-year-old from a prominent family in
the village, had been snatched a week earlier by
three policemen. One of the three had raped her.
"We are an honourable family," said the
messenger, according to the woman, "and do not
wish to cheat you."

"So we did not see them engaged," the woman
said. "I hear that she is locked up in a room.
She will never again see the light of day, and
will die an old woman in her parental house."

Rape victims in Kosovo are victims twice over, a
second time as a result of their communities'
lingering commitment to the traditional Code of
Leke Dukajini, a body of customary law under
which the clans of Albania have lived since the
15th Century. It still holds in parts of Albania
and Kosovo.

The code, which has evolved over centuries,
covered all aspects of social activity, from the
role of the church and care of livestock through
to marriage, and tellingly, honour. It urges men
to protect their wives and daughters, and a man
who fails to exact blood revenge for the
dishonour of one of his womenfolk brings shame on
his entire family, and isolation from other
families in these closely-knit village
communities. It leads many to think the rape
victim has brought shame on her family through
her misfortune. Some think the victim is better
off dead, and 'encourage' suicide.

But Serb paramilitary forces have used rape to
target the families of supporters of the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA), fully aware of the
devastating effect the rapes have on the fighters
and their home communities. For a year or more
before the onset of the NATO air offensive, Serb
forces were routinely detaining women family
members of men suspected of separatist activity.

The first reports of this strategy emerged from
the villages of Likosani and Cirez in the
district of Drenica where women were detained on
27 February and held for 48 hours. A week later,
in the aftermath of an attack on the family of
well known guerilla supporter Adem Jashari in the
town of Prekaz, some 200 people were held in an
arms factory in the town of Srbica. There,
according to one witness, young women were
separated from the group and assaulted.

The reports continued for months. In October a
squad of masked Serb paramilitary police
surrounded a group of young people from the
village of Ljebusa as they picked chestnuts in a
wood near the Decani monastery. They beat up the
boys and took away a 15-year-old girl.

Released an hour later, there was no hiding her
ordeal. She was scratched and weeping, and her
hair had also been slashed off with a knife. That
last was an offence against honour in itself, in
a region where people may judge whether a girl is
married, single or engaged by the way she combs
her hair. Her entire family packed up and left
for the town of Rozaje in Montenegro the
following day.

For those families who cannot or will not leave,
what then for the victims? According to the
patriarchal customs defined by Dukadjini and
others, a woman raped in front of her own family
is expected to commit suicide and bring the
family shame to an end.

If not, the shame ripples outwards: the victim
becomes a virtual prisoner of her own home,
unmarried girls are normally prevented from ever
marrying and even their sisters may end up
spinsters because of the humiliation the family
endures. Married women victims of rape can be
forced out of the home, even if they has children.

In the face of this cruelty, the women of Kosovo
fight to keep their ordeals secret - a solidarity
in silence.

A woman who helped a neighbour whose two
daughters-in-law were raped by three masked
policemen in a Kosovan town near Pec last
November, vowed to keep the attack and their
identities secret. The women's husbands had been
forced to flee the country. "I didn't tell
anyone, and neither did the mother-in-law. Their
husbands do not know about the rape. If they did,
they would have forced them out of the home
immediately."

Journalists and human rights activists only
lately came to understand the scale of the
atrocities. Few realised that the systematic use
of rape as a means of ethnic cleansing and
gaining military advantage - as practised during
the Bosnian war - was being repeated in Kosovo.

Investigators checking out reports of Bosnian-
style 'rape camps' run by Serb forces in Kosovo,
tend to draw a blank. The young women detained
for a day and a night in the village of Jabukovo
Polje in Drenica last September will say only
that they were 'threatened' and questioned about
their fathers and brothers' part in the KLA -
nothing more. Some of the victims who have spoken
to the media or rights investigators have
reportedly been further ostracised, not only by
their families, but also by fellow victims.

Even in the village of Vranic, where it is known
that a group of women were raped in September
last year, the victims strenuously deny the
attack. Only one elderly woman would speak. "I
saw a lorry-load of raped women taken to the
station in the town of Suva Reka. They were
dressed in torn-up rags and hiding their faces
with their hands in shame. One of the women whom
I knew said only: 'it would have been better if I
had been killed'."

Finally, what of the perpetrators? Hopes that
they may be one day brought to justice are slim.
The thousands of Muslim women held in the 'rape
camp' in the Bosnian town of Foca also suffered a
second time at the hands of their own people.
After being interviewed by countless journalists,
many then found themselves ostracised by fellow
refugees by the time they reached the relative
safety of a camp in Turkey. Many had to move out.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia in The Hague indicted nine of
their attackers. One went voluntarily to face
trial in The Hague and one was shot dead during
an attempt by Western SFOR troops to arrest him.

The others are still at large, freely walking
the streets of Foca.

Gordana Igric is a senior editor with IWPR who
has investigated rape as a war crime in both
Bosnia and Kosovo.